The Waters of Eternal Youth

by Donna Leon

  ‘They’re so strange, the Greeks,’ Brunetti said as he sat down.

  He took a few bites of his pasta, nodded in approval, swallowed, and said, ‘It’s like reading about America in the nineteenth century: so many of them accepted slavery as part of society.’

  ‘And the connection?’ Paola asked and set down her fork to sprinkle a bit more cheese on her pasta. It was pecorino affumicato and not parmigiano : he approved.

  ‘The Greeks saw nothing wrong in going to war over the kidnapping of a woman, yet when a city was conquered, the men were slaughtered, the women enslaved, and no one gave it a thought,’ he said.

  ‘Well, no one on the winning side,’ Paola said, then added, ‘The victors get to write the poetry.’

  ‘I thought that was the history.’

  ‘They write both,’ Paola said and got up to get them more pasta.

  As they drank their coffee, Paola, holding her cup in the air, asked him with no introduction, ‘Do you think she knows?’

  Brunetti raised an eyebrow, wanting to make sure he knew what she meant

  ‘This girl. Woman. Manuela. That something’s wrong with her.’

  Brunetti knew Paola well enough to know how much work she’d put into making the question sound casual. ‘Most of the time I think she has no idea,’ he answered.

  She set down her cup. ‘But sometimes?’

  ‘But sometimes her whole face tightens and she looks around, as if she’s misplaced something. But then it passes and her faces loses all animation.’

  Paola picked up both cups and saucers and put them beside the sink. She raised her head and looked out of the window, staring off in the direction of the mountains, invisible now. She stayed that way a long time.

  Later, when he was under the covers and reading, he came upon a passage and read it to Paola, about the birds who defended the island of Ares by hurling their pointed wing feathers against the Greeks and wounding ‘the left shoulder of goodly Oileus’, who ‘dropped his hands from his oar at the sudden blow’.

  ‘How very bizarre,’ she observed, putting down her book and turning off her light.

  Brunetti continued reading until the end of Book Two and then turned off his own light. He feared that his sleep would be troubled, filled with drowning girls, but instead it was peaceful, and he woke to bright sunshine and a sense of optimism.

  Brunetti had just finished reading an email from Bocchese when Griffoni knocked on his door and came in. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just after eleven.

  ‘I called her mother at nine and asked if I could stop on my way to work. She said she and Manuela were going to see her ­mother-­in-­law, but we could meet on the way.’

  ‘Did you?’ Brunetti asked. He didn’t know where Griffoni lived, so he had no idea of how convenient it would be for her to get to Santa Maria Mater Domini or to a place between that campo and the Contessa’s palazzo.

  ‘There’s a bar near Palazzo Mocenigo: it was the only one I could think of,’ Griffoni said. ‘We met there and Barbara and I had a coffee, and then I suggested I walk along with them, so that she and I could speak,’ she said.

  Brunetti noted the use of the first name but said nothing.

  ‘Manuela likes to stop and look in shop windows, so we had the chance to talk. I asked her mother if the doctors had ever told her the full extent of Manuela’s injuries.’

  Concerned that the use of her first name might have led Griffoni to some sort of ­all-­girls-­together delicacy, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you ask her explicitly?’

  Griffoni’s glance was level, and she said, ‘I asked her if she’d been told that Manuela very likely had been raped before she went into the water,’ she said, then asked, ‘Is that sufficiently explicit?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said that she might have been told but that, over the years, she’s managed to wipe away the memory of the time she spent in the hospital with Manuela.’

  ‘Does she have any idea if her ­mother-­in-­law knows about this?’

  ‘I thought to ask,’ Griffoni said neutrally. ‘She says it’s impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because her ­mother-­in-­law would have intervened if she’d known.’

  Brunetti knew she wasn’t finished, so he waited.

  ‘Guido, I don’t have kids, so I don’t know what it’s like to have one of them in a coma. But I believed her when she said she made herself forget it all, and I’d also believe – if you asked me – that even if she had been told at the time, she might not have let herself register what she heard.’ After a moment, she added, ‘That’s all.’

  It was only then that Brunetti thought to ask himself if it made any difference whether Manuela’s mother had been told or not, had chosen to believe or not.

  ‘Then let’s get something to eat before we begin watching television,’ he said. He wasn’t sure if she was surprised or relieved by his suggestion, saw only that she got to her feet immediately and started towards the door.

  While they ate tramezzini at the bar down at the bridge, Brunetti told Griffoni what he’d been told by Rizzardi and the little that had been in an email from Bocchese, sent in advance of the final report: ‘None of the fingerprints on the knife matches anything on file; the angle of entry suggests the blow was delivered by a person about the same height as the victim, who was 1.75; two more knives like it in the kitchen; lots of DNA traces, but that will take some time to sort out.’

  ‘Do you remember if the doors were ­double-­locked when you went in?’

  ‘No, they weren’t, but they lock automatically, so I still needed the keys to open them both. Whoever it was either had the keys, or Cavanis let him in.’

  ‘And our men?’ she asked.

  ‘Vianello sent Pucetti and Romani to go door to door to see if anyone noticed anything, but you know the chances of that,’ he said.

  When Griffoni made no comment, Brunetti sat back and held up his hand. First finger: ‘He had keys or Cavanis let him in.’ Second finger: ‘There was no sign that the apartment had been searched, and I saw that his wallet was still in his back pocket: so we can forget about theft.’ Again, Griffoni made no comment, so Brunetti concluded by saying, raising his third finger, ‘Either he went there to talk to him and things got out of control, or he went there to kill Cavanis. In that case, he’d take a weapon, I think.’

  ‘Sounds like impulse to me,’ Griffoni said.

  ‘There was bread and cheese on a table near the television,’ Brunetti said. ‘But no knife.’

  ‘Voilà,’ Griffoni said, but with no sense of pleasure at the fact.

  ‘You’re willing to accept that it was a man?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Women don’t use knives,’ Griffoni answered, reciting it as though she were Euclid listing another axiom.

  Although he agreed with her, Brunetti was curious about the basis for her belief. ‘You offering proof of that?’

  ‘Kitchens,’ she said laconically.

  ‘Kitchens?’

  ‘The knives are kept in the kitchen, and their husbands pass through there every day, countless times, yet very few of them get stabbed. That’s because women don’t use knives, and they don’t stab people.’

  Brunetti toyed with the idea of trying to work this up into a syllogism, but instead he said, ‘Shall we go back and look at those programmes?’

  Because they had no idea of what they might be looking for, Griffoni and Brunetti had no choice but to watch it all and watch it carefully, even the rerun of The Robe, a religious costume meatball that pitted Victor Mature and Richard Burton against Caligula, a fight they were doomed to lose.

  Brunetti remembered having seen the film on their old black and white television when he was still a boy, with his father sitting behind him, hooting and laughing
at the story and making loud fun of the false piety of the actors while his mother repeatedly asked him to stop mocking her religion. The scene, the one in real life, had ended in tears, and Brunetti had not been able to watch the end of the film.

  He watched it now, ­stony-­faced, appalled by the terrible sentimentality, worse acting, and historical nonsense but unable to join in Griffoni’s laughter for fear of betraying his mother’s memory.

  When the last saccharine scene had played itself out, followed by the first in a series of commercials, Griffoni buried her face in her hands and wailed, ‘And I thought that was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen the first time I watched it.’

  Brunetti leaned forward and stopped his computer, relieved to see the screen grow black. Signorina Elettra had joined them silently to watch the film and had betrayed her presence only by a series of muffled giggles. Into the silence that followed the darkening of the screen, she said, ‘I’ve never been asked to authorize extra pay for ­life-­threatening service, but I think we all deserve it.’

  They talked for a while, then decided to watch one more hour of the programmes before going home. They watched the news, and he saw the vaguely remembered story about the fire in an apartment in Santa Croce. He glanced aside and saw Griffoni shoving back the sleeve of her jacket to see what time it was. ‘Only until the end of the news, then I’ll buy you both a drink,’ he said.

  Griffoni turned and smiled. Signorina Elettra did not, for tedium had turned her into a pillar of salt. Next came the strike of the vaporetto ticket sellers, and then the newly ­clean-­shaven ­Vittori-­Ricciardi described his project, and then it was over and they were free for the day.

  It came upon Brunetti to spread his hands and tell them, ‘Go in peace’, but he resisted the temptation and contented himself with renewing his offer of a drink.

  20

  It was dark when they left the bar, each of them going in a different direction. Brunetti chose to walk home, hoping that the sight of beauty would cleanse his memory of the dead man and the impoverished life he must have led in that apartment. Had he been talking with Paola, he probably would have made some remark about how much more harmful television was to the brain than alcohol, had he not known that this was not true, having seen too many drunks who proved how much worse alcohol was.

  His steps took him towards Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo, but he passed the basilica without stopping to go in. Down the bridge into Giacinto Gallina: another bridge, another one and there on the left was the back of the Chiesa dei Miracoli. He crossed the fourth bridge so that he could walk along its side, letting the alabaster walls soothe his spirit. He stopped in the tiny campo and studied the façade. He’d once heard of a singer who boasted that her high notes were higher than anyone else’s: the church was more perfect than any other perfect church.

  His spirit was at peace by the time he reached home. Paola was happy for his kiss of greeting and the children pleased to have his full attention during dinner. As he ate his bean soup, knowing there was only lasagne to come, he wondered why this wasn’t enough for so many people. Why did they have to have more? his innocent self asked. No sooner had the thought come than a more mature voice told him not to ask such stupid questions.

  Later, when Paola came back to place the deep dish of lasagne on the table, Brunetti looked at her, looked at his children, and said, ‘How happy this makes me.’ His family smiled their agreement, thinking he meant the food, but it was the last thing on Brunetti’s mind at that moment.

  After dinner, he continued with Apollonius, who finally approached the story of Jason and Medea. The myth had upset Brunetti from the first time he read it. It was Euripides he’d read then with such chilling effect, when still little more than a boy and reading it in Italian, not yet able to attempt the Greek. He recalled how frightened he had been of Medea’s rage as it soared up from every page: ‘Hate is a bottomless pit; I will pour and pour.’ ‘Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate.’ Her voice had struck some chord in him; he’d known these things were true, though he had never seen them – not yet – in action. How often, later on, had he heard these confessions in his professional life? Medea had confessed, in a way: ‘I know what evil I am about to do, but even my realization of what will come after cannot stop my rage.’

  By a conscious act of will, he set the book aside before Jason arrived in Colchis. Not tonight. Not with the memory of Manuela still fresh and not with tomorrow promising to be a day spent examining the life and death of Pietro Cavanis.

  When he reached the Questura the next morning, Brunetti called Bocchese to ask when he could check Cavanis’ telefonino for numbers called and calls received, only to be told that the technicians had not yet checked it for fingerprints, but that should take only a few hours. Brunetti called Griffoni and told her it was movie time again, though it was only a bit after nine.

  Together, they spent two hours watching – to no purpose they could fathom – the last of the programmes from the local television station. As if to counteract the cloying sweetness of The Robe, the evening’s viewing had closed with a discussion of the problems facing the city. Did people in other cities spend all their time talking about their city? he wondered.

  Present were two former mayors, one who fell and one who was pushed. Along with them were a member of the Centre Right, a representative of the Lega Nord, and, no doubt in an attempt to ensure that at least one of the panel would not become violently abusive, a female journalist from the Corriere del Veneto.

  The presenter asked the politician from the Centre Right party to begin by outlining what he thought were the chief problems facing the city. That was the last time one person spoke alone, for no sooner had the politician begun his answer than he was interrupted by one of the former ­mayors, who was in his turn interrupted by the man from the Lega Nord, which left the other mayor no choice but to interrupt with his own vision of reality.

  Brunetti lowered the volume until they were reduced to whispering, then inaudible – though violently agitated – heads: Francis Bacon might have painted them. The journalist brushed the hair back from her forehead, raised her hand as if trying to hail a cab, and then accepted reality and pulled a book from her bag and began to read.

  ‘Sensible woman,’ Brunetti said and then asked rhetoric­ally, ‘Do you think it makes any sense for us to watch more of this?’

  ‘Neither for professional nor personal reasons, I’d say,’ Griffoni observed. ‘If I were to see more of it or to listen to any of them, I’d probably renounce my right to vote.’

  Brunetti pressed a key and the participants and moderator went off to cyberspace, leaving a dark screen behind.

  Griffoni sat back in her chair, and Brunetti noticed, as he had so many times in the past, just how long her legs were. ‘I remember the first time I went to dinner in London,’ she said. ‘Everyone at the table was English, except me, and after the first course I realized that only one person spoke at a time. When that person finished, someone else said something, and everyone waited until he or she was finished before commenting. Individually.’ She smiled, then laughed, at the memory.

  ‘At first I thought they were rehearsing a play or perhaps it was some sort of English party game, but then I realized that this is the way they behave.’

  ‘They wait in queues, too,’ Brunetti added.

  They allowed the moment to pass in reverent silence and Brunetti said, ‘I’ve been thinking about Cavanis and what we need to know. Who his friends are. Or his enemies. Bocchese will be finished with the telefonino in a few hours, and we can check the numbers in the memory and the numbers he’d called recently.’

  She nodded in agreement and added, pointing to the screen of the computer on which they had watched the programmes, ‘Aside from Victor Mature’s flapping nostrils as he accepted the robe, I didn’t see anything in those programmes that was interesting, and certainly nothing I could con
strue as a reason for what happened to him.’

  Brunetti checked the time and raised his eyebrows when he saw that it was not yet noon, so endless had the programme seemed.

  ‘I’d like to go over and talk to the man in the bar again,’ Brunetti said. ‘With Vianello,’ he added.

  She couldn’t disguise her reaction to the Inspector’s name, but Brunetti didn’t know whether she was offended or surprised.

  ‘It’s that kind of bar,’ he said in explanation. ‘If we walked in together . . .’

  ‘Whereas with Vianello there’ll be the glue of testosterone,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  She snorted and gave a huff of exasperated acquiescence. ‘It’s a good thing Manuela’s horse is a female or they probably wouldn’t let me ride her,’ she said.

  ‘Have you?’ asked a surprised Brunetti.

  ‘No. This weekend. I’m not on duty, so I’m going out there.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Riding?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you miss breathing?’ she asked.

  He called Vianello and arranged to meet at the front door of the bar, then called Foa and asked him to take them over to Rio Marin. The same man was behind the bar and nodded to Brunetti in recognition, then meted out a brief nod to Vianello. They both asked for white wine, which Brunetti didn’t much want. The barman poured them without giving in to his evident curiosity.

  Brunetti smiled and said, ‘I’ve a few more questions.’

  ‘I’ve been reading the papers and people in the neighbourhood have been talking about it,’ the barman told him.

  ‘They probably make more sense than the reports in the paper,’ Vianello said, a comment the barman met with a smile. ‘No one from the papers called to ask us for information, and we’re the police.’

  Brunetti, who had seen a photo of the façade of the apartment in that day’s paper, said, ‘They must have sent someone over here; that’s for sure.’